Speaker 0: And if you’re joining today for non, we have an amazing from the non to provide some firsthand industry insights on using Pardot. So you to our speaker today, Haines. Take it away, Terry.

Speaker 1: Thanks, Emma. Uh, my name is Terry Haines. I am the CRM manager at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Uh, we recently have transitioned to Pardot from Mailchimp. It was kind of an interesting transition. Really, I think the biggest thing for me was, uh, kind of surprised to see the lack of resources online, uh, for this specific transition, uh, you know, going Mailchimp to Pardot. So I have put together a deck kind of detailing our experiences, some lessons learned, and, uh, I hope it’s helpful today. Thank you again to Emma and Sercante for hosting ParDreamin and asking me to come and present. Um, so with that, let’s go ahead and get into it. So just, uh, to start out with some background about CSIS. Um, so CSIS is a nonprofit. We’re kind of a traditional or a nontraditional nonprofit in that we are a think tank based in Washington, DC. Been around since the sixties, uh, so kind of an old guard think tank. Um, our nonprofit model is a little bit different in that we are a high-dollar, low-volume donor base. So we don’t really, you know, unlike traditional nonprofits who who take a lot of money from a lot of people, a lot of small-dollar donations from a lot of different people, we take primarily organizational uh, donations. So back in 2016, we rolled out Salesforce, um, as our new CRM system. This was actually before I started as CSIS in 2018. I was replacing Raiser’s Edge and Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. Uh, never personally dealt with those systems, but from what I understand, they are quite difficult at times. We also had Informs was our email marketing system at the time, and we selected Mailchimp to replace that, uh, mostly as a stopgap solution. Uh, it never was intended to be kind of the enterprise solution. Uh, but over the years, it it as we became kinda more entrenched in it, it almost became harder to get out. Um, so just, again, some more kind of background about the organizational structure of CSIS. We are a pretty decentralized organization. What I mean by that is that there are about 35 different research programs that effectively operate independently. Um, they do have quite a bit of autonomy. Um, and so because of that, it can be very difficult to manage from an administrative organizational perspective. Um, because of that, I have about 150 Pardot users. Uh, we don’t have a traditional marketing team. Um, so that certainly brings its own challenges, especially when, you know, you have, uh, interns and, um, you know, just young junior staffers with really no, uh, marketing prior marketing experience now running your marketing systems. Right? So a lot of training required there. And then just the only other piece of background I wanted to give you here with, uh, our Mailchimp implementation is that, um, we kinda had a weird structure set up, uh, and it it really had to do with how Informs was set up prior to Mailchimp. But to kind of migrate that over, we had three separate but not distinct audiences for mailing. We had our, quote, unquote, public list, which was, uh, accessible from our, um, you know, subscription page on our website. We then had a kind of a private, quote, unquote, members list and then a separate list for press. What that meant in effect is that I, as a contact, could exist across all three mailing audiences as, uh, Mailchimp calls them, which means I could unsubscribe from email from CSIS and get another one right behind it because I didn’t know, you know, oh, actually, I was also on this member’s list. Um, so really confusing to manage from an internal perspective. I mean, we had, you know, users at CSIS that couldn’t even explain the differences between three. So, you know, how was an external subscriber supposed to understand that? So, uh, all of this to say, we had our issues with Mailchimp for sure. You know, again, lack of granular permissioning meant that anyone here who could send an email could create a new template. In fact, Mailchimp often encouraged the creation of new templates when you sent an email. So that led to a lot of issues. Um, you know, here you can see something has happened to this email that we sent out. Um, the banner clearly didn’t make it across. Something’s going on at the top here. Um, you know, another big issue we saw was these insufficient integrations that really never really kinda fit the bill in terms of getting that data into Salesforce the way we wanted it. Uh, the native integrations weren’t great. We actually ended up going through Kizoomi. And so, therefore, we would sync Salesforce campaigns over to Mailchimp as, uh, Mailchimp, uh, segmentation groups. And so because of that, there wasn’t a lot of insight into why those campaigns had those contacts. Once those contacts were added from a report to that campaign, you had no clear answer as to why those 30,000 people were grouped together. Hopefully, the user had named that campaign well, but these inconsistencies and, um, you know, struggles really kind of led to this lack of professionalism and brand identity. Here you can see where someone had created a email from another email, left the original footer in here, copyright 2020, copyright 2019. Just looks terrible. We’ve got a hardcoded preference and and, uh, unsubscribe link in this email with another one from, you know, the actual SIN where it was added. Uh, here, you can also see, um, you know, our mobile formatting would break pretty regularly. You know, you’ve got, like, a nine-point font here on a mobile email. Just doesn’t look great. Um, also, we found that Mailchimp, you know, heavily slanted towards kind of e-commerce small business, whereas, you know, we’re an enterprise nonprofit. It just never really quite fit our bill. So, uh, we knew we had these issues with Mailchimp. We just weren’t sure kind of what the answer was. Uh, so starting last year, actually, around this time, uh, 2020, uh, we began to look at, uh, a few different systems solutions to our Mailchimp woes. Um, obviously, working very closely with our Salesforce AEs. Um, you know, they were definitely pushing us towards the Salesforce product. Obviously, the biggest selling point there is just that close integration, right, and the data that that comes with it. Uh, Pardot kind of stood out to us as the most powerful platform, uh, of these three. We we thought that Marketing Cloud could be, uh, an answer, but frankly, the price point just made it, um, kind of impossible for us. And I think, you know, a lot of nonprofits are gonna feel that same way. Um, they certainly all have their pluses and minuses. Um, there are there are definitely things about Pardot that doesn’t quite fit our use case. But, um, at the end of the day, it fit our use case the best. Um, you know, Constant Contact, kind of a similar to Mailchimp. Marketing Cloud, again, really just has these features that we really wouldn’t use so much. SMS marketing, we would never do. Um, and, again, because of our our donor, uh, base and and, you know, because of our nonprofit setup with not really taking individual donations from folks, it just didn’t make that much sense. We kind of seems more like we needed that B2B marketing. So we ultimately settled on Pardot, uh, and that began our implementation phase. Um, we officially signed our contract with Salesforce on 01/04/2021. Uh, it took us about six months, uh, to get fully implemented. Quite a bit of challenges along the way. Uh, arguably, the biggest one was that, you know, we had to run these systems concurrently. Standing up Pardot and getting it running, getting our IP warmed up while we still were using Mailchimp on a daily basis. So, uh, that was definitely, I think, probably our biggest challenge throughout this process was, you know, trying to ensure a consistent user experience, subscriber experience while getting emails from two different systems and trying to make sure that, you know, as someone unsubscribes through Mailchimp that we’re not letting them get an email out of Pardot. So just to kind of walk you through our implementation here a bit. Um, you know, we took about a month to really kind of lay out our initial strategy, figure out, uh, you know, what we’ve got, um, kinda cleaning up our data, looking through, uh, kind of what requirements we need out of a new system, um, because Pardot is highly configurable, and we wanted to make sure that our users, you know, had what they needed upfront. We did partner with Sercante. I think that was a huge, uh, piece to that was extremely critical to our success in getting Pardot launched. Um, I personally had never used Pardot, uh, prior to signing this contract. I’d never even seen it. I was confident that it would work for us from what I had seen from, uh, the discussions I had. I actually attended ParDreamin last year, um, and that was very helpful as well. Um, but, you know, so getting that off the ground, a lot of that first couple of months was basically just be me by myself, uh, kinda working on getting this stuff set up, working with some, um, key members in our external relations department to determine sort of our campaign strategy, set up kind of the organizational structure of Pardot and what we were looking for, what made sense for, again, this very decentralized, uh, organizational structure. Uh, so we know we needed to, you know, kinda have things where folks, uh, have their folders that are sort of locked down to their user group so that, you know, another program can’t use my list of contacts even though all contacts are shared. Um, you know, many programs do have kind of their own, um, independent lists that are, you know, quote, unquote, their lists. Certainly, Sercante was, uh, incredibly helpful. I’d like to shout out Sarah Hernandez for her help on all of this because she was phenomenal through this working with me as I, you know, bit off a little more than I could chew, I think. Um, but it was really excellent working with her, um, kinda getting all this stuff set up. Um, getting this tested, connected, um, we did move to a dedicated IP address, uh, which allowed us to get that SPF and DKIM alignment, um, which we were never able to really do with Mailchimp. Um, I will say getting that dedicated IP set up was tough because, uh, of the IP warming. Uh, that was really our biggest challenge between training and warming up that IP to start. Um, you know, I basically had, again, roughly 150 users to train in about a month. Um, it’s actually closer to two months. We kinda took about a, I would say, maybe a 20-user, uh, guinea pig group and kinda had them be the first to go through the trainings, um, kinda get them into the system first so they could start using it and kinda tell us what’s working, what’s not, what do we need to expand on in training. Uh, highly recommend taking sort of a power user group like that, um, when you are working on this implementation. Uh, but, again, then, you know, over the course of the next month, uh, throughout the month of May, I trained about 120 users in four weeks. Um, the biggest thing I can suggest to you in doing that is do not initially, I tried, um, you know, just setting up a bunch of, uh, Outlook calendar events and and shooting them all out and saying, hey. You know, make sure you sign up for one. Uh, within the first week, I had 65 people signed up for the last day of training. So we decided that was actually not a good idea, and in fact, we were gonna tell them, hey. You know, programs A through G, you’re training on this week. H through M, you’re training on this week. Um, so I would recommend kind of making sure you have some pretty solid structure, uh, to your training. I will say that was kind of a a misstep on my part. Um, but, again, as we then kind of transition these users out of Mailchimp into Pardot, The idea was that as we slowly bring people on, our mailing volume will slowly increase. In practice, what happened was people were a little hesitant to use the new system, understandably, uh, didn’t wanna make mistakes. So where their volume was kind of a fire hose going in, uh, coming out of Mailchimp, it then slowed to a bit of a trickle until a couple of programs came along that all of a sudden were mailing 40 to 50,000 people per email, and our IP warming didn’t quite go as planned. Uh, we ended up with some snags. We had a day where, uh, in fact, you know, had to raise a case with Pardot because I think, uh, we just really overwhelmed this new you know, this baby dedicated IP, and we had this issue where all of a sudden our emails just quit sending. So, uh, there was a little bit of little bit of, um, challenges on that front, uh, but then come as of July, uh, June 1, uh, we were able to actually pull the plug on our Mailchimp integrations, flip that switch, and everyone was into Pardot. So it seems a little daunting to, you know, completely flip your mailing system in a manner of months, uh, but it’s very much doable. I I can assure you that. Um, so just take a look at some of the migration statistics here. We had about 250,000 prospects we ended up migrating. Um, these were our mailable prospects. So, again, you know, uh, a big piece of this was kind of going through the data we had in Mailchimp and Salesforce, cleaning up those, uh, emails. We ran every contact we had through NeverBounce to make sure we cleared out any of that stuff, um, and and make sure we were only bringing good contacts over. Right? Um, had quite a few existing segmentation lists that either needed to be rebuilt or, um, in the case of some of these, they’re actually built on a custom object in Salesforce, so we had to get that custom object integration set up in Pardot. And that management of those lists is still being done in Salesforce with dynamic lists picking up those changes in Pardot. Uh, we now have 70 templates. Um, you’ll see on the next slide, but in Mailchimp, we had over a thousand, uh, that had been created over the years. And then, you know, just some individual statistics on kind of the amount of assets that we transferred over. Some things that we really do love, uh, about Pardot here, um, those custom redirects are fantastic. Um, you know, we’ve kinda used those as a workaround to allow us to take those completion actions on multiple links within a single email. We send a ton of emails with, um, you know, newsletter-style emails or even in the case of some of our, um, kind of analyses and and publications. Um, those will often have a lot of links. And if there are specific links in there that we are trying to track, those customer redirects work really well for that. We’re using the dynamic content on our flagship newsletter, which is really cool because we’re able to, uh, dynamically display different pieces of content based on the interests, um, that folks have told us that they’re interested in. Right? So if I know that, you know, one of our subscribers is interested in defense and security, I can display our latest defense budget analysis. Whereas if I know that they’re interested in China, we can display our latest, um, you know, trade policies with China, um, commentary or or something like that. So that has been critical, uh, in terms of Mailchimp, uh, lacking those features. I think it is something that they’ve been working on. Unfortunately, we were kind of grandfathered into a pricing plan, uh, because we’ve been with them for quite some time that without upgrading our pricing plan and effectively doubling our costs with Mailchimp, which was already stretching our budget, we weren’t able to take, uh, advantage of any of those kind of new features that they were coming out with. So, um, the segmentation options in terms of kind of building out your segmentation list based on activity that um, users or or subscribers are taking really has been a a hit with the users. Um, I think, you know, again, as I kind of discussed earlier with Mailchimp, we had this issue where a lot of our groups, our mailing groups in in Mailchimp that had come from Salesforce, there was just zero transparency in terms of kind of who they were. The, um, website tracking as well, um, really interesting to us. It’s something that we’ve established, but kinda are still trying to figure out what the best way to utilize all this new data we have is. Um, so really interested in kind of, uh, learning more from the community about that. And then, you know, again, with the completion actions, there are certain times where, particularly with our smaller groups or, uh, you know, when we do have kind of private events and send out small invite lists, uh, we love the being able to set up those completion actions to set up Salesforce tasks, following up with unsubscribers. Right? You know, it’s it’s really nice, especially when you have this high-level folks to be able to, um, kinda check back in with them and see, you know, hey. Was this was this intentional? Would you like to still be receiving our mailings? So, yeah, definitely love some of these new features of Pardot. Just kind of some general statistics about Mailchimp and Pardot. Uh, you can see here we actually doubled our click rate. Uh, our open rates also, uh, jumped up quite a bit there. You know, again, really just I think the the key takeaway for us has been simplifying and streamlining the user experience, uh, in terms of the subscriber experience. Um, really just makes things a lot easier. And then, likewise, on our side, for our users, um, you know, having many, uh, far fewer templates for them to select from leads to far less confusion. You don’t end up with these broken templates that, you know, someone created four years ago. Our opt-out rates are down as well. And, again, just that less confusing subscriber experience. Right? We now have uh, it’s much easier for subscribers to opt out of individual lists without fully unsubscribing. Um, we are in the process of setting up a subscription opt-out, uh, reasons form, um, which, uh, I’ll get to here in a bit. But generally speaking, Pardot has been worlds better for us than Mailchimp was. So some lessons learned out of all of this. Uh, first and foremost, good implementation partner was key. There’s no way I could have done this on my own, um, you know, as a solo admin here. Um, I I was hired as a Salesforce administrator. I knew that I would be working in Mailchimp, and then I I also managed Mailchimp. But at at this point, you know, now I’m essentially a Salesforce and Pardot administrator solo. And so it can be done. I promise you. Um, but that implementation partner is definitely key. Um, I would have been lost in the dark without Sercante by my side throughout this. And even even on a you know, it it wasn’t some huge scope contract, but just having that resource there to ping questions off of or, um, you know, ask, um, really, really strategize on what you’re trying to do as an organization, uh, really, really helps. I also have some community resources listed here that I really found, uh, super helpful, particularly with Pardot. Um, first, the Salesforce Exchange Discord I’ve been a part of for about four years now. A really, really wonderful group of guys and gals out there. Um, global community, tons of specialty channels, tons of, uh, Salesforce MVPs in the chat. Uh, likewise, this Email Geek Slack channel has been very helpful. They do have, uh, both a, uh, Pardot specific channel as well as, you know, a number of kind of marketing and, um, sector-based channels that’s nonprofit one, for example. Uh, and then, you know, the Spot for Pardot and the Drip, uh, both of these, I think, are widely recognized by the community as as great kind of blogs and community resources for ideas for things to do in Pardot. Um, but, basically, you know, you want to work with your implementation partner to develop that plan. Um, they bring much needed expertise to the table. Um, I would also say, you know, make sure you budget for some scope creep, uh, and a little bit of slide in your project. Um, you know, we’d all love to be able to stick to our deadlines, but, uh, just building that time in beforehand can definitely help out, uh, so you’re not getting pushed up against the deadline that you can’t move. So, um, another lesson learned here is definitely to really understand your data and migration strategy. Um, there were a couple of times where I kind of made decisions, not on my own, but a little bit. Um, I I was a little too eager to to get going and and realized, you know, after I had stood up 40 suppression lists that, oh, man. I’m doing this wrong or, you know, hey. Actually, this we should configure this this way. Um, the biggest, uh, thing that I think really helped us was going through all of our our core data uh, in terms of our Salesforce contact data before migrating anything. Right? The more you can clean up before you migrate it, the less you’ll have to worry about end Pardot. That said, that doesn’t mean that, you know, it’s a one and done thing. That should be a continual process of kind of data hygiene and and cleanup. There’s, um, some great tips, uh, from the Spot for Pardot about, um, you know, setting up these sorts of, uh, uh, dynamic lists that are looking for bad emails or junk emails. Uh, I think another thing that really, uh, has been crucial with us, uh, with Pardot is the, um, restriction on role-based emails. We had a ton of kinda spammy sign-ups using manager at or info at just generic emails. Um, so Pardot just flat out stopping those really helps, uh, tremendously. Uh, I also definitely would recommend mapping out that data flow, um, kind of ensuring that you have, um, you know, all of you you you fully understand, especially in our case where we were coming from kind of three audiences down to one, uh, you know, figuring out, okay. Well, if someone has unsubscribed from this audience, but it looks like we did it as an admin because they should have never been subscribed there, what does that mean when we migrate? Are we gonna bring them in as, you know, transactional emails only? Do we wanna bring them in fully subscribed? Do we wanna reach out? We actually had, you know, a segment of our audience that, uh, it was kind of unclear as to to how we should proceed, so we decided to just go ahead and email them all and say, you know, hey. We noticed, uh, there’s some issues, uh, with, uh, our mailing system integrations. It looks like you potentially unsubscribe, but we don’t quite have that. You know, would you like to continue receiving our emails or not? Certainly, you’re not gonna get a 100% response rate on that, but anyone that you can keep, uh, is better than, you know, just unsubscribing everybody. And, again, here, properly warming up that dedicated IP address, uh, really crucial. I wish we’d been able to do a better job of that because, uh, you know, again, I think we went from kind of a few thousand, maybe 10,000 emails a day to all of a sudden one day we’re sending, like, 80 to 100,000 emails a day, uh, and it really kinda gave us some hiccups. But, um, all figured out now. Um, not seeing any issues, haven’t seen any issues in, uh, really kinda since launch, which has been great. And then finally, also, you know, use this inflection point, uh, of a switch to really think about your mailing strategy. Um, you know, again, we as I mentioned at the beginning of this, it it is tough in an organization like ours to, uh, really have that kinda institutional authority, uh, over relatively autonomous groups. But, um, that certainly doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to kind of improve what you’re doing. Right? So we had done a bit of a data analytics study of our mailings, uh, kinda leading up to this transition. We found out that 60%, uh, so 66%, excuse me, two-thirds of our emails were event related. We we host a ton of events, uh, certainly all kind of digital hybrid events now, uh, over the last couple years. But even prior to COVID, we had a ton of in-person events. So we send a ton of event-related emails, you know, uh, either invites, save the dates, uh, watch live reminders, those sorts of things. Uh, and what we realized is that, you know, as we were sending these emails out, uh, a lot of a lot of our programs had this idea that, oh, well, you know, I need more RSVPs. I just need to send more emails. And we had seen a couple of different events. We actually had two events over this about two-year period we studied where they had sent over six emails about the same event to roughly the same group of people. And, like, that’s just not an effective strategy of the shotgun approach of quantity over quality. Right? And so we really wanted to kinda pair that down. Uh, I think Pardot gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of really targeting our SINs and, you know, truly, um, um, finding those people that really do care about what you’re what you’re sending and and have engaged with that kind of content in the past. Uh, whereas before, it was kind of a shot in the dark with Mailchimp. And, you know, our directors and staffers had this idea that, you know, quantity is gonna get us there. Um, and so, you know, 40,000 people on your email wasn’t enough. It needs to be 50 or whatever it may be. Whereas, you know, the right 5,000 are gonna get you more RSVPs than the wrong 50,000. And so what we actually found was that past a third email, a third event-related email, you actually ended up with more unsubscribes and opt-outs than you did new net RSVPs for that event. So because of that, we’ve now limited our users. Uh, we’ve said two is actually gonna be our number. So, you know, ideally, an invite out a couple of weeks ahead of time and then watch live reminder maybe an hour before the event. Uh, some folks like to do a save the date and then an invite. Uh, but regardless, you know, it gets back to kind of using this systems change to make a strategy change, and that really was our biggest win, I think, in terms of how we do business. Um, you know, of course, there’s always gonna be kind of some organizational pushback. People are always gonna be resistant to change. Um, there’s kinda two schools of thought here of, you know, do you while they’re also experiencing the system change, just go ahead and throw a little bit more pain on there of kind of, hey. We’re also gonna change the way we’re actually doing things, or do you try and kinda spread that out so that it’s not as much pain at one time? We decided to go ahead and do it all at once. I think that’s the better strategy here. Um, the key to that is just clear, constant communication. Uh, you gotta have a communication strategy around a new system implementation, uh, particularly something of this scale. Um, you know, this is a system that, again, over half of our staff are using on a daily basis. Uh, you really, really have to make sure that you’re available. Your training is, um, kinda up to speed. Um, you wanna make sure that, you know, you have these resources in place for folks before the system launches. Uh, so I make sure, you know, we’ve got a a pretty robust documentation library set up for everyone, uh, and I had that live day one. Um, so to kinda wrap all this up, you know, I think you can do this, uh, even if you are by yourself, even if it’s a small organization, a big organization. Um, it’s definitely doable. Um, you will find some challenges along the way. You’re gonna have challenges that are unique to your organization. None of them are impossible to overcome. There’s always a way around it, over it, through it. Some way you can figure out those solutions. Um, and, again, you know, I gotta thank Sercante for their assistance throughout this because I think I’d probably still be trying to implement the system without them. So, um, with that, I’ll leave you with a piece of, uh, parting advice here of how to write a good email. You write it, you delete most of it, and then you send it. Uh, most of us have way too much in our emails. I think we can all agree on that. Um, keep it simple. I’ll leave that last S off. With that, Emma, thank you so much. I really appreciate, uh, your allowing me to come on today and talk. Uh, I think we do still have a few minutes here. If do you wanna open it up for questions, Emma?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Thank you so much, Terry. What a great presentation. Um, in the chat, it looks like we did have one question from Amanda that we could spend a couple minutes on. She was asking, we are moving contacts from Mailchimp to Salesforce. Any suggestions on a smooth transition?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, that’s tough. So it sounds like these are kind of contacts that they have in Mailchimp that aren’t currently in Salesforce. Um, so that’s a bit of a challenge. Right? We our systems were set up such that the API integration was connected, uh, from our website directly to Salesforce, creating those contacts first and then kicking it to Mailchimp. So, uh, we didn’t really have this issue of kinda orphaned contacts in the mailing system that were in the CRM. Um, I would say, you know, if you can try to collect more data. I don’t know how much you’re connect collecting in Mailchimp as it is. Um, but if there is a system, um, you know, potentially, uh, like, for example, we use Leadership Connect. I know that there’s, like, Bloomberg has some, uh, kind of information databases about people. Uh, the more information you can collect on, you know, these user or these subscribers that you have, uh, to bring into your CRM other than just name and email, uh, I would say would be more helpful. That said, you know, we’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts in our CRM that are just name and email. Right? It’s not the end of the world, but, uh, I would just suggest, you know, trying to get as much of that data upfront before migrating into in Salesforce.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Thank you, Terry. Uh, any other questions from anyone before we break? Give everyone a second to type. All right. Looks like we might be done with question up for today. Thank you so much for joining us, um, and a special shout-out to all of our sponsors for their support. Without them, part of your possible. Uh, so make sure you pop into the sponsor booth to learn more about what they all do and get your points to also wanted to shout out that Terry is gonna be joining us for the migration panel at noon, so we hope to see you there for that as well. Thanks so much, everyone, and have a great day.